Human Superintelligence: How you can develop it using recursive self-improvement, Human Superintelligence: How you can develop it using recursive self-improvement

Whatever it is that you want to achieve in your life, enhanced intelligence will help you get there. It will enable you to develop better strategies for achieving your goals. The same applies to humanity in general. The spread of higher cognition will change everything. It will produce a Second Enlightenment and a genuine science of complexity. A new kind of human will enter history and evolution. This book provides science-based psychotechnologies that you can use to escalate your intelligence and cognition. It shows how to use them recursively to improve your cognition indefinitely. The psychotechnologies will enable you to enhance your thinking, then use your improved cognition to enhance your thinking further, then use it to produce further improvements, and so on, open-endedly. These psychotechnologies will enable you to scaffold an ability to ‘stand outside’ your thinking and 'see' it as ‘object’. This critical capacity will enable you to ‘see’ and evaluate the thinking strategies that you now use. Whenever they fail, you can identify the reasons and remedy the deficiencies. The book shows you how to do the same for the hierarchy of meta-thinking strategies you use to develop your thinking strategies. As part of the self-scaffolding process, you will actively seek opportunities to test and improve your cognitive strategies. Finding a flaw in your thinking or meta-thinking strategies provides you with an invaluable opportunity to enhance your cognitive capacity. The capacity to ‘stand outside’ your thoughts and feelings is invaluable for escaping and remedying maladaptive thinking. However, as the book shows, it can also be used to escape maladaptive emotional responses and conditioning that may otherwise sabotage achieving your goals. The psychotechnologies also include methods to scaffold metasystemic cognition - a capacity to build mental models of complex phenomena. This higher cognition will give you the ability to comprehend and manipulate complex circumstances. The book identifies the new 'movements in thought' that you will need to incorporate into your thinking to develop metasystemic cognition. The spread of metasystemic cognition is essential if human civilization is to survive the complex existential threats we face. These challenges cannot be solved by the cognition that underpins mainstream science and spread during the First Enlightenment. This cognition is largely limited to developing mechanistic, reductionist models. They are too simple to model complex phenomena and produce a genuine science of complexity. The spread of metasystemic cognition will drive a Second Enlightenment. It will enable a new kind of science that can solve the complex challenges that threaten us. The book demonstrates how higher cognition will enable humanity to comprehend for the first time the larger-scale evolutionary processes that have shaped humanity and will determine our future. Significantly, metasystemic cognition will enable you to see that evolution has a trajectory that includes a critical role for humanity, individually as well as collectively. Fulfilling your evolutionary role has the potential to provide a life that is meaningful and purposeful in a much larger scheme of things.